An amphibian writer, translator, poltergeist,researcher... my doppelganger pretends to be a Professor of English, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Being All Ears-A Beginner's Guide to Stop Being Dumb in English

BEING ALL EARS:
A Beginner’s Guide to Stop being Dumb in English
(But is Anyone Listening?)
Sachin Ketkar

We think learning a language is all about coaching that one mighty mouth we are blessed with and that two ears on the either side of our heads can take care of themselves. Remember what we did with our mouths when we were born? We let out a really big howl and hunted frantically for food. When it comes to using language, we have come a long way baby.

We started soaking up language first with ears. Remember all baby talk spoon fed into our ears when they cuddled us? We aped our elders and after many disasters, we started making right noises. Which means it all started with our ears. Listening always precedes speaking.

This is one of the important reasons why people classified as `dumb’ are those who can’t hear other’s speech. Therefore they cannot mimic human speech properly.

My argument goes like this: We cannot speak English properly because don’t listen to English properly. We are English Dumb because we are English Deaf.

One of the reasons we are English deaf is because we simply don’t have enough of it around us. English is used only in a few places in our society. We don’t buy our parathas or pumpkins in English and English cuss words sound pretty dehydrated and tame compared to the best and choicest of our home-grown abuses.

The other reason is our schooling. The only time they paid attention to our ears was when they planned to squirm them. Nobody told us that the two muscles on the two sides of our heads were actually antennas, for instance.

What was even more terrible was that in school they thought English can be learnt from a book. Trying to speak fluent English by reading a book is like trying to be a fantastic singer by simply reading about it. If you think really think you can speak English fluently by reading Rapidex or Wren and Martin, you can also try learning to sing that way. Not that I mind. But please don’t expect me to turn up for your concert.

Many among us feel that if we can’t speak English fluently we are backward, unintelligent and stupid. What’s even worse, many among us feel that they are progressive, intelligent and smart if they can speak English well.

Spare a moment about all those Spoken English classes which have run over our town. They pretend to give us exactly what REALLY WANT and we really want is to SPEAK ENGLISH WELL. That means speaking English is the question of life or death for us. In all desperation we want to learn to speak and if someone tells us he will teach him to do other things, we feel we are being taken for a ride. Listening? But why should I bother about it all? I possess an excellent pair of ears and to my knowledge they are working perfectly well. Why should I bother to learn how to listen? Nobody taught me how to listen to any language or even music, for instance, and yet I think I am pretty smart at these things. If you think like this, I would only politely point out: think again and have your knowledge about these things rechecked. A person who is mediocre in one’s own language is the person who does not take listening to one’s own language seriously. And vice versa.

Then there is that other guy whom you bump into almost every day. He says, ` I can follow English well’ he says, ` I merely don’t know how to speak fluently.’ My response would be `Mate, you don’t really follow English well and that’s why you can’t speak it fluently’. He is often the same the person who would say, ` I can understand written English but I don’t have enough vocabulary to express myself.’

And pray what do you mean by vocabulary and where would you find this vocabulary of yours? Vocabulary consists of words and words are songs. You have to hear them and learn to sing them. What’s the use of the dictionary for learning songs? The best way to learn a language is by learning to sing it. And to learn how to sing you have to hear the song properly. One of the quickest ways of picking up English is by using our ears.

So lets be all ears to English in all its tangs and tunes. Let’s enjoy Indians surfing languages like a bored teenagers surfing TV channels. Let’s toast those grammatical curiosities and exotic noises that pass solemnly for English. Let’s watch the sloth of clichés and threadbare expressions walk with exhaustion in our verbal forests. Let’s keep our ears pricked for a refreshing turn of phrase. Let’s tune ourselves into all clever and not-so-clever analogies and contrasts that surround us. Let’s carefully listen to how Barack Obama plunges into rhetoric and how Abdul Kalam serves his Masala Dosa English. Let’s notice how Laloo Prasad Yadav makes Bihari more interesting by speaking his imagination of English. Let’s pay attention to how Hermione Granger stutters and Harry hesitates or how James Bond speaks through his Scottish guns. Lets be curious cats with nine more lives asking why a particular speaker speaks in a particular way. The craft of listening is much more than improving English. After all, enriching our languages means enriching uranium of our lives.

So, by now if you feel listening is important please listen to what I have to say about listening itself.

I hold there is a deeper relationship between our personality and language and that acquiring a language almost amounts to acquiring a different personality. Listening is a dynamic process of understanding others and ourselves. It involves opening up to others as well as opening ourselves to ourselves. In short, listening is not merely a language skill but something more fundamental to our personality for our relationships. It is only when listening starts to fade away that a relationship is on its way out.

Though it may sound obvious, the listening artist is usually alert not only to what is being said, but is also alert to how something is being said. We should also listen with our eyes. The listening artist reads what is writ large on the speaker and his body language. She reads not only to the content of the speech but also the emotional overtones, undertones and fears. So let’s listen with undivided attention and multiplied curiosity.

I would like to end what I have said by pretending to be an expert in listening. I classify the dynamic process of listening into three types:

i) Listening to Spit: It is usually done to with a view to challenge, reject or question someone’s views. Much of the activity is premeditated and conclusions are drawn even before a speech begins. At its mildest it is listening with a Slant.
ii) Listening to Swallow is the opposite of the first type. It tries to absorb everything the speaker says without thinking much about it. It is a data grabbing mode, the mode of college students who start preparing late for their exams and very lately start attending lectures.
iii) Masticating is the superior and a very complex mode of listening. Listeners paradoxically involve themselves as much as possible while at the same time distancing themselves from the style and content of the speech. It is a balancing act which avoids the earlier two extremes and yet gets best of both the modes. Lazier ones and beginners can easily fall between the stools.

3 comments:

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Many thanks for this refelection. I too learnt to speak Bangla and then HIndi fluently simply by listening, on and on, to anything and everything. For the Bangla, I cannot but express my gratitude to Doordarshan. Sadly, "hear", "hear" does not seem to make any impact on others.

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Sachin C. Ketkar (b. 1972) is a bilingual writer,
translator, editor, blogger and researcher based in Baroda, Gujarat. His recent
publication is a collection of Marathi critical articles on contemporary
Marathi Poetry, globalization and translation studies titled Changlya Kavitevarchi Statutory Warning:
Samkaleen Marathi Kavita, Jagatikikarn ani Bhashantar (2016). His Marathi
collections of poems are Jarasandhachya
Blogvarche Kahi Ansh (2010) and Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (2004). His poetry in English
include Skin, Spam and Other Fake
Encounters: Selected Marathi Poems in translation, (2011), and A Dirge for the Dead Dog and Other
Incantations (2003). Several of his writings on translation are published
as (Trans) Migrating Words: Refractions
on Indian Translation Studies (2010).

He has extensively translated from Marathi and
Gujarati.Most of his translations of
contemporary Marathi poetry are collected in the anthology Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005) edited by
him. Along with numerous recent Gujarati writers, he has rendered the fifteenth
century Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta into English for his doctoral research. He
has also translated the work of the well-known contemporary Gujarati writers
like Manilal Desai, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakkar, Jayant Khatri, Mangal
Rathod, Jaydev Shukla, Rajesh Pandya, Rajendra Patel, Nazir Mansuri, Ajay
Sarvaiya and Mona Patrawala. He has also translated poems of Ted Hughes and
fiction by Jorge Luis Borges and Adam Thopre’s into Marathi. He won ‘Indian
Literature Poetry Translation Prize’, awarded by Indian Literature Journal,
Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 2000.

He holds a doctorate from VN South Gujarat
University, Surat and works as Professor in English, Faculty of Arts, The
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. He is also Coordinator of
the department research project under UGC SAP DRS II on “Representing the
Region: Literary Discourses, Social Movements and Cultural Forms in Western
India, 1960-2000.